Saturday, March 23, 2013

An AP Student Comments on Time

Here's a comment by an AP student on how much time homework takes. A lot of the homework debate appears directed to high performing students. I think we need to consider homework and its affects on average and struggling students. Here is the comment I wrote to what he said.

The issue of
time depends greatly on what we mean by time: The time the assignment “should”
take or the time the assignments actually takes. The issue this AP student
presents is somewhat different from the issue that affects the average student.
Homework is a fact of life going back to elementary school and most AP students
have had success with it all along. AP classes are intended to be similar to
classes taken in college. In college, a full time course load may involve 16
credits. If the student spends two hours doing homework for every credit hour
of lecture time, that’s 48 hours per week, a reasonable workload for a college
student. So it may be difficult to develop time criteria that make sense for
students who take these advanced classes but are going to school more than 6
hours a day.

The issue I focus
on is the less advanced student who has been struggling with homework from the
beginning. Time, measured by the assignment, does not allow for the fact that
kids work at different paces. So that student who is normally bright, and
college bound, but not the budding AP student, normally takes more time to get
the assignment done. And some students take so long, that they cannot get it
all done. The ongoing penalties and teacher-parent pressures they receive
actually turns them off to school, rather than foster their education.

I call these
kids homework-trapped, and the only solution for them is to create true
time-bound limits to the work they do. I discuss this more in my book: The
Homework Trap: How to Save the Sanity of Parents, Students and Teachers and on
my website: www.thehomeworktrap.com.